Intermezzo: Will Intelligent Machines Return to Chaotic Environments?

Structuring the environment really consists of two parallel processes. On the one hand, it means removing the chaotic and unpredictable (and often intractable) behavior of natural environments. On the other hand, it also means removing the chaotic and unpredictable (and often intractable) behavior of human beings. The purpose of all the rules and regulations that come with a structured environment is to replace you (a messy human intelligence) with an avatar that is like you (in fact it shares your body and brain) without the quirkiness of human intelligence. That avatar lives in a highly-structured virtual world that mimics the natural world without all the quirkiness of the (wildly unstructured) natural world.

My thesis is that machines are not becoming particularly more intelligent, but, instead, it is humans who are structuring the environment and regulating behavior so that humans become more like machines and therefore machines can replace humans.

But what happens if machines become truly "intelligent"? If "intelligent" means that machines will become what humans are before society turns them into rule-obeying machines, then, ironically, machines may acquire all the "baggage" that intelligent biological beings carry, i.e. the unpredictable, chaotic, anarchic behavior that any living being exhibits, i.e. precisely what the structured environment and rules and regulations aim at suppressing.

It would be ironic if creating intelligent machines would turn machines into (messy) humans at the same time that we are turning humans into (disciplined) machines.